The Phone-A-Friend pilot program is running at the Makiling Integrated School in Calamba Philippines. After a few nation-wide delays in the semester start, the programme started in October with five dedicated tutors and a class of 47 students!
We hired our five tutors through a combination of local connections, social media outreach and virtual interviews. The five candidates we ended up choosing all have education degrees and a passion for teaching, but different areas of specialization. This allowed us to match students to tutors based on their respective challenges. For example, a student who struggles with mathematics were matched with a tutor who has taught mathematics!
With an amazing team of five tutors, we went onto the next stages of preparation. We remained in close contact with the school, and most notably teacher Veronica, who helped us inform the parents and secure consent for participating in the program. On October 28th, the school arranged a ‘gifting ceremony’, or a launch, where parents came to pick up Phone-A-Friend materials, the phones and the sim cards. At this point, we were all ready to go!
A few weeks into the program, the teachers carry out the tutoring sessions twice a week with the students. We have set up group chats for daily contact, monitoring sheets to record student progress, and have weekly check-ins to discuss any troubleshoot problems. It has been an exciting process – while it is challenging to run a remote teaching program in the midst of a pandemic, we are learning a lot, and we are pleased with the results so far! We will be sharing individual stories, tutor profiles and our findings in the weeks to come.
This post was first published at the Phone-A-Friend website.